What we think influences what we do; guides and prompts behavior.
e.g., Pilot error is usually a memory problem: someone forgets or gets distracted.
e.g., Icons on computer desktop are cognitive prompts.

How we think influences what we think.

Information-processing perspective is useful, thinking of the mind as a computer with
inputs,
encoding,
storage, and outputs.
This has been the dominant metaphor of
cognitive psychology
since the mid-1900s.

But 'emotion' is missing from the computer metaphor.
If one imagines emotions associated with different possible decision choices,
the feelings (visceral inputs) associated with each outcome informs the choice.
Some people lack an emotional response and that leads them to make poor judgments.

Topic 1: Research methods

Wilhelm Wundt (1875): tried to be aware of mental processes. Pioneer.
First psychology lab; founding of scientific psychology.
Goal: identify primitive units of perceptions and thought, the components of emotion.
Stimuli applied to subjects, who were asked to say how they reacted (e.g. a ticking metronome)
in terms of what the mind does (feeling, sensing), not the meaning.

Wundt's approach was similar to chemistry, looking toward creating a table
of 'mental elements' that would be much like a chemist's periodic chart of the elements.

Cognitive psychology is now dominated by experiments, where a change is made to the
IV
and the effect is measured on a
DV.

William James (1890):
Functionalism.
The mind is not a thing to be taken apart
but a process, "a stream of consciousness" from which
the mind emerges.
Mental processes occur in certain ways to help you survive.

Data were inconsistent and a pattern did not emerge.
Therefore introspection
did not show how things are organized.

Not verifiable (because internal).

Unconscious portions of the mind could have big effects on behavior.
But introspection does not see the unconscious.
[Freud's self-analysis was introspection, and he is guessing in his
claims that he mapped the unconscious.]

The use of words to describe non-verbal experiences is imprecise.
Non-verbal responses (such as the measurement of reaction time) are more precise.

IV = whether a student took a lesson on sample size, the lesson
showing that a larger sample represents a population better than a smaller sample.

DV = the number of good ideas generated in response to a problem.
Students that had the lesson generated more ideas.

Herman Ebbinghaus (1880s):
First experiments about memory,
using trigrams of nonsense syllables (uncontaminated by prior memory or association).
Ebbinghaus self-tested how many trials it took him to be able to recite them back perfectly
in sequence.
Then how many did he remember after an elapsed time.
And how many further trials were needed for him to become word-perfect again.

Topic 2: Forming memories.

Jimmie, interviewed by Oliver Sachs; Korsakoff's syndrome (chronic alcohol abuse results
in gradual, progressive damage to subcortical memory structures); he was nearly 50 but in mid-1970s
he believed he was 19 and in 1946.

George Sperling (1960) presented triple rows of symbols (letters, numbers) for fraction of a second.
On average, participants could name 4 symbols.
Partial report technique:
After training with a tone they heard AFTER the visual glimpse (three tones, one for each row),
participants could name 3-4 symbols in the row corresponding to a random tone, though they
could not remember the other rows; they recalled the symbols from which ever line was signaled
after all the symbols were no longer visible.
Therefore you register all 12 (3 rows of 4) symbols but recall only your row.

Echoic memory for sounds. Lasts 2-3 seconds in ideal conditions,
so it's longer than iconic memory. But in real-life there are distractions.
Partial report technique is also useful for echoic memory.

Best design is (a) test-retest design, with (b) immediate testing and
(c) retesting after waiting month or years (for durability).

4 independent studies have found a lot of inconsistencies,
increasing with elapsed time.

Winningham, Hyman, Dinnel (2000): accounts of people on hearing the verdict in the Simpson
double-murder trial with a verdict that surprised or shocked most citizens;
asked to describe what they remembered about the moment they heard the verdict:

people asked 1 week and then 8 weeks later gave very self-consistent reports.

people asked 5 hours and then 8 weeks later gave inconsistent reports.

What one was doing at the time of learning. 73% consistency on retest.

Emotional response of oneself. 20% consistency on retest.
This was statistically insignificant.

Emotional response of others. 0% consistency on retest, but so rarely measured
that no statistical significance.

Aftermath: what did they start to do after learning the news. 0% consistency on retest,
but so rarely measured that not statistically significant.

Prediction: who you believed responsible. 41% consistency on retest; not statistically significant.

Prediction: who you believed would be the USA response. 42% consistency on retest;
not statistically significant.
Initially, 46% predicted war or military retaliation.
On retest, 71% claimed they had.
However, the noise made the data not statistically significant.

Retrieving LT memories is a constructive process.
This includes specific events.
We are not activating verbatim memory,
but integrating general knowledge of how the mind works.

People use fragments of information to try to reconstruct the past:

Present people with new information and ask them to recall it.
Often they make semantic errors, adding something meaningfully related.

Autobiographical memory is constructive. We remember many big events,
but make errors on the details.
Studies of autobiographical memories (by Linton and Barsalou) suggested that
people often summarize two or more events of the same type, combining them into one recollection.
e.g. 40 years after high-school boys were asked their current judgments of
parents and friendships, they were re-tested: failed to recall judgments of
mother's love and father's discipline; but did remember the importance
to them of having a girlfriend.

Bias to overestimate long-term stability of attitudes, which drift after 9 years and
possibly less.

Bias to believe one's traits (personality characteristics) are getting better,
especially by exaggerating how bad they used to be.

Barlett read the Native American story
War of the Ghosts to British participants and later asked them to recall the story.
He showed that forgetting occurred because prior knowledge got in the way.

Topic 4: Recovered memories.

Loftus and Pickrell (1995) demonstrated they could implant
false memory
in 24 participants by creating (with the aid of the participants' families)
a false account of becoming lost in their favorite shopping mall at age 5:

Participants recalled 68% of true childhood events (augmenting written information they were given).

29% (7/24) participants 'recalled' the false childhood event included in the written information they were given.

People that believed they had been abducted by space aliens, but had no conscious memory of it.

The control group: people that did not believe they had been abducted by space aliens.

The group that claimed recovered memories described symptoms of
waking up unable to move, tingling and/or floating sensations, and flashing lights.
These experiences are consistent with 'sleep paralysis' which is known (from sleep studies)
to occur when people wake straight from REM sleep (which includes loss of muscle tone).
Scientifically, the simpler explanation (sleep paralysis) is more likely than alien abduction.

Personality tests showed that this group (compared with the other two) scored higher on hypnotic
susceptibility, depressivity, and
magical thinking.

The second group believed they had been abducted by space aliens but had no conscious memory of it;
they
reported some experiences that had puzzled them (insomnia, waking up in strange positions,
preoccupation with watching a lot of science fiction programs on TV, etc.) and
that they were looking for explanations.

Personality tests showed that the third group (compared with the other two) scored lowest on hypnotic
susceptibility, depressivity, and
magical thinking.

Repression:
Not demonstrated reliably as an additional cause of forgetting
to decay and interference. Repression fails to replicate experimentally.
By contrast:

While negative-arousal images are not remembered as well as neutral stimuli if tested immediately,
they are remembered better 1 week later, as are positive-arousal images.

Flash-bulb memories become less accurate with time.
But the fact of having heard the shocking news does not get repressed.

Studying children present at a sniper attack on a school,
none of the children forgot the attack: no repression.

Adults are susceptible to efficient and event persistent (and unwanted)
memories of stress, appearing in PTSD: those adults do not show repression.

Malquist (1985): studied children who witnessed (age 5-10)
the murder of a parent. All were haunted by it.
Likewise young children that were kidnapped.

Natural selection makes it advantageous for a species to remember and avoid
scary events, to survive better.

Supreme Court (1990s) set 4 criteria for admissibility of scientific testimony,
including that it had to be mainstream.
Repression is not mainstream.

Recovered memory therapy:
Thousands of people that went through recovered memory therapy have subsequently
returned to denial of those memories as representing events that happened. APA investigated
with a panel of advocates and critics working together, who could agree only:

Most people abused as a child remember the abuse.

It is possible to remember abuse that had been forgotten for a long time.
[Does not mention 'repression' explicitly.]

It is possible for people to create convincing pseudo-memories of abuse
when they had not been abused.

There exist gaps in our knowledge.

Lack of supporting evidence for recovered memories:
Recovered memory therapist claim but have not proved (especially with causal data):

Severe adult problems are often caused by childhood traumas.

People tend to repress their experiences of abuse in childhood.
Repression has not been proved.

Memories can be recovered with accuracy in adulthood.

The procedure of recovering memory will help
clients become healthier.

Ask how such codes could be translated from 'kinesthetic' codes
to verbal codes.

Refer to the work of Ebbinghaus and his successors, who clearly and repeatedly
established that repetition improved memory.

Goodman et al. (2003) report on 175 well-documented (medical records, corroborating
records) cases of adults abused in childhood.
The more severe the abuse, the more likely a child was to:

Report the abuse at the time.

Remember it now.

Ceci et al. (1994). Preschoolers were taught to repeat a false account of
getting a hand caught in a mouse trap and being taken to hospital.
Later, many of the children forgot the source of the data and claimed it happened.

Hyman and Pentland (1996). Adults were told an event (false) that 'happened'
to them as children (such as spilling a drink on a bride's dress).
Later 25% believed this false event happened to them.

Expanding on the above, a similar experiment where half were encouraged
to fill in perceptual details.
They are even more likely to believe the event really happened.

Expanding further, adults were told to invent a false account; later
many believed their account related a true event, and that the memory
'felt' real.

Lindsay et al. (2004). Contacted parents of ~50 college students;
obtained two true school events for when their child was in grade 5-6;
two for grades 3-4; and two for grades 1-2.
Added a third but 'false' event for each age group.

Each participant was read each of their three events,
and encouraged to create mental images.

Half the participants were also shown their class photo at that age.

Participants were told to try to recall these events for the next week.
They were given the printed event descriptions and (if assigned to the group
to see them) photos.

1 week later they returned to the lab and described the events.
23% of those that were not shown a photo developed a false memory of the false event.
65% of those that were shown a photo developed a false memory of the false event.
Thus, photos are useful retrieval cues for false memories (as well as for real memories).

Many participants were surprised that the memory was false (when told at debriefing).

Even more extreme:
body memory
is the storing of information at a cellular level outside the brain.
However, movement memory is stored in the cerebellum and memory of being touched
is stored in the cortex.

Hypnosis

Experiment: 27 people highly susceptible to hypnotism;
asked if they had been woken up by a loud noise during the last week,
and they had not;
under hypnosis,
each taken back to a night one week before and asked if they heard a loud noise
that woke them up; under hypnosis, 17 claimed that they had;
after hypnosis 13 still claimed it happened.

Leading questions are asked under hypnosis, causing higher false memories.
Does not reliably increase accurate recall of emotional events.

Experiment: Dichotic listening. Shadow one channel, repeating it aloud.
Later try to recall information from both channel.
Result: Can only recall details of information in attended channel;
remember almost nothing about the unattended channel;
can tell if it was a human voice, its gender;
some people notice if the unattended voice changed.

How do we select what we attend to? Bottle-neck theories:

All stimuli processed to a certain stage.

Everything pours into sensory storage.

Only attended stimuli get further processing.

Early versus late stage of the bottleneck.

Broadbent's 'filter' model.
Filter prevents overload of central processor;
filter is flexible.
Filter out incoming stimuli that don't match.
Then a second filter that looks for sound that match the target.
Series of filters using simple physical properties (not meaning).

Flexible: attention easily reset.
Some people can shift very quickly.
Mistakes occur when a person fails to shift attention quickly enough.

Natural concept: a mental representation of a class of objects that includes their similarities
and accommodates their differences. Based on experience rather than based on rules.
Represents the center of a category.

One can also apply semantically related concepts, each part of a network
and dependent on its connections to other concepts, such as in a field of medical knowledge.

Some characteristics are trivial but some are essential: e.g.,
you can dye a skunk so that it is the color and pattern of a raccoon, teach it to make sounds like
a raccoon, etc, but it is still a skunk (kids say 'it has a raccoon mummy and a raccoon daddy').

Ben Franklin recommended listing pros and cons, and comparing the costs and benefits of each list. But
there are often uncertainties of long-term effects and consequences. So one makes a
judgment.

Judgment by definition is made under uncertainty, with
incomplete information. So you use
heuristics.

Availability heuristic:
if an event occurs frequently, then instances of that event will come easily to mind. Influenced by:

Chance of direct experience in your own sample.

Retrieval cues.

Recency of events.

Attitudes.

Risk: what should we try to avoid.

Mental images that are vivid make us more likely to recall them.
In 2001 were there more homicides or suicides in USA?
Most people say homicides.
But there were 50% more suicides than homicides.

Number of reports.
Statistically, 30 times as likely you'll be killed by a falling airplane part as by a shark attack.
But new reports almost an order of magnitude more articles on shark attacks than falling airplane parts.

Personal experience.
If you survive a catastrophe (flood, earthquake) you are more likely to buy insurance.

Mysterious events. e.g. NYC World Trade Towers.
But in Sep-Dec 2001, 350 more people were killed than average on the road,
because so many more people drove instead of flew.
"The amygdala starts firing and all that higher-level stuff goes out the window&quot [David Douglass, 2006].

Representativeness heuristic:
judging a stimulus according to how similar it is to a category of stimuli.
If one focuses too much on similarities,
stereotypes get activated.

Lots of guesses are guided by the representativeness heuristic,
using the idea that events and their causes should have similar factors.
Overuse led to blood-letting for a person with a fever because they looked red, the color of blood.

Always look for the base rate.
e.g. More people are hit crossing at a green light than a red light.
But more people cross with a green light than a red light.
And it's safer to cross with a green.

Many people expect randomness to 'look' random without an identifiable pattern.
But while the long-term is random, the short-term is not.
On a Head-Tail coin toss, HHHTTT is as likely as HTHTTH.
[What is unlikely is TTTTTT and HHHHHH.]
A random process does not have any balance that can be restored.

Represent the problem.
Define the desired end-state and begin the search for a path.
Try to avoid functional fixedness (the tendency to represent objects as serving their usual function),
by allowing yourself non-standard uses and non-standard combinations of what is available.

Develop a solution to the problem.
Prior experience and knowledge (familiarity) can help people generate more solutions.

General strategies in developing solutions:

Trial and error. Can be impractical, but worked for Edison and his thousands of substances attempted
for the filament of a light bulb.

Heuristics (simple rules for solving problems)

Means-ends-analysis. Divide the problem into subproblems and work through them step by step.
Often essential for solving complex problems.

Algorithm: a rule or procedure that is guaranteed to produce the solution of a particular type of problem.
Example: a recipe.
May be inefficient however.

Reasoning by analogy: compare two things that are different,
yet focusing on their similarities. e.g. neurotransmitters analogous to a key fitting a lock.

Glossary

Plays a major role in
short-term memory,
according to the difficulty people have in memorizing a list of similar-sounding words
(such as: cap, map, man, can, mad).

Acoustic Memory.

Can hold information for up to two or three seconds.
Contrast visual memory.

Teasdale did experiments in which people did an acoustic task and a visual task.
They were LESS likely to report having thoughts unrelated to performing
a task if the task was unfamiliar.

Addiction.

A condition where a body has physical and psychological negative reactions to the
absence of a drug.

Aggression.

Behavior causing physical or psychological harm to other people.

Algorithm.

A formula for a calculation that produces a precise result.
Contrast with the time-saving mental shortcuts provided by
heuristics, which can be efficient and are often good enough,
but are sometimes misleading.

Alzheimer's disease.

A chronic organic brain syndrome, usually late in life,
whose symptoms include memory loss, decline in intellectual ability, and
personality change, often toward a more infantile personality.

Amnesia.

A failure of remembering.
Usually refers to a set of memories that are related temporarily;
often caused by trauma (medical, pharmaceutical, physical, or psychological).
See also anterograde amnesia
and retrograde amnesia.

Amygdala.

Part of the limbic system. Controls emotions (including fear) and aggression
as well as the formation of emotional memory.

Anterograde amnesia.

A type of
amnesia
in which the ability to form new memories is mainly lost.
There is limited ability to express newly learned skills, but only in the exact same context
as that in which the skills were learned.
Compare retrograde amnesia.

Anticipatory coping.

Efforts made before an event that is expected to be stressful
to reduce or accept the believed imbalance between demands and resources.

Anxiety.

A strong emotional response caused by a potential conflict;
also by the 'preconscious recognition' of an emerging 'repressed conflict'.

Attention.

Mental focus on a mental event or on a stimulus
that is a subset of the available perceptual information.

Attenuation theory.

Triesman proposed that one does not block out unattended information but
instead that one turns down its volume.

Attitude.

Position of the body expressing a feeling in the mind;
by extension, that feeling.
Relatively enduring.
Includes both cognitive and emotional components.

Attribution.

Motivation to explain behavior:

Situational: caused by the environment.

Dispositional: caused by something inside the individual.

Fundamental attribution error: over-estimate the contribution of another person's
disposition
(internal attribution)
and underestimate the contribution of situational causes.

Self-serving bias: use dispositional attribution for good behavior
and situational attribution to excuse bad behavior.

Audience inhibition effect.

One's tendency to feel inhibited from helping by the presence of other bystanders,
by whom one fears to be will evaluated negatively if one intervenes inappropriately.

Authoritarian personality.

A personality showing submission to authority, rigid
adherence to conventional values, and prejudice against other groups.

Automatic process.

A mental process that does not require attention, allowing it to
be performed without interfering with other tasks.

Autonomic nervous system (ANS).

Part of the body's peripheral nervous
system; controls involuntary motor responses; connects
the sensory receptors to central nervous system (CNS); connects the CNS to
smooth muscle, cardiac muscle, and glands.

Availability heuristic.

Cognitive shortcut of judging of an event's probability
as more likely when it is relatively easy to think of examples of that event.

Availability heuristic.

Cognitive shortcut of judging of an event's probability

Avoidant attachment style.

A style of social relationships emphasizing suppression of trust and attachment needs.

The phenomenon when a person detects a visual stimulus (such as by moving their hand to its
precise location) without being conscious that they have detected the stimulus.

Blocking.

When a new stimulus is presented to an organism,
if it occurs simultaneously with a stimulus already effective as a signal,
then the organism cannot recognize and learn the new stimulus as an unconditioned stimulus.

Body memory.

Proposed as a mechanism for the storing of information at a cellular level outside the brain.
There is no scientific evidence any memories can be stored outside the brain.
Note that movement memory is stored in the cerebellum and
memory of being touched is stored in the cortex.

Bottom-up processing.

From sense organs to the brain.

Brain stem.

Brain structure at the bottom of the brain and top of the spine;
regulates basic life processes.

Expression of strongly felt but usually repressed emotions.
Reduction in the aggressive (or other) drive following an aggressive (or other) act.

Capacity model.

Kahneman proposed that a person's state of arousal influences the allocation of mental resources.

Capacity theory.

We have limited brain power to distribute.
When portions of the pool of resources are allocated to a task,
insufficient portions can be available to perform other tasks.
We prioritize, allocating more attention to important stimuli.
The approach is like
working memory
with multiple resources, each allocated to different tasks and working independently (as long
as the load is not too big).
Most evidence is consistent with multiple filters and multiple capacitors.

Cell phone.

Many experiments show that talking on a cell phone significantly
(1) slows down a driver's response
and
(2) increases the number of driver
errors, including failure to stop at a stop sign.

Traits that exert a disproportionate influence on one's overall impressions,
causing one to assume (but not prove) the presence of additional traits in others.

Cerebellum.

The region of the brain attached to the
brain stem;
controls motor coordination, posture, balance,
and the ability to learn to control body movements.
Used in fast consolidation.

Chronic accessibility.

An idea that tends to come to mind easily and often.

Chronic stress.

A continuous state of arousal where one
perceives greater demands than one's resources for dealing with them.

Chunking.

Taking single items of information and grouping them into units in order to store more information in
STM.
e.g. organize letters into words; think of a phone area-code as a unit; chunk groups
of words into phrases so fewer eye movements are needed in reading.
This recodes them
on the basis of some organizing principle (such as similarity or association)
into larger wholes.
Helps you store more in
short-term memory.

internal structures and representations used in cognition between stimulus and response.

relationships of processes and structures to behavior.

Began September 11, 1956 at an M.I.T. symposium on information theory.

Cognitive revolution.

Cognitive theory of emotion.

A stimulus causes physical arousal, but it's the cognitive appraisal of that arousal
that leads to feeling an emotion.
e.g. calling someone to ask for a date is more likely if you meet them on a scary suspension bridge
than 5 minutes off the bridge.

Cognitive therapy.

A therapy [developed by Aaron Beck] that assumes that
our beliefs and perceptions influence our emotional responses.
Our negative thought patterns (rather than unconscious conflicts or early life traumas)
are the causes of mental disorders such as depression anxiety.
Cognitive therapy helps patients/clients to become aware of such beliefs as well as their effect
in producing problems, and then helps patients/clients alter such beliefs.

Compliance.

Public action to follow with a direct request.

Common fate (law of).

A Gestalt law or rule
that one tends to group together elements moving in the same direction at the same rate.

Compulsion.

Uncontrollable, repetitive, or unwanted urge to perform some act;
can be a defense against unacceptable ideas;
failure can leads to overt anxiety,
but therapy can include not performing the actions and finding that one survives.

Concept.

Mental representation of an object, event, relationship, property.
A basic unit of thought.

Confirming behavior.

Behavior
that matches the (believed) opinion of an observer.
E.g. A randomly selected volunteer is judged by an opposite-gender interviewer
to be more likable on average
if the volunteer was told earlier that the interviewer liked them,
when compared with volunteers told, "she didn't seem to like you".

Conformity.

One's tendency to adopt the behaviors, attitudes, and
values of other members of the group to which they want to belong.
A conformer responds to imagined as well as real
group pressure.
See also
group polarization.

Connectionist Approach.

Assumes that networks are made of simple processing units.

Consciousness.

Attention with awareness.
Applies to internal and external events and environment.

Consistent Mapping condition.

In Schneider and Shiffrin's study of visual search for targets,
the number of targets has an effect on processing.

Stimuli can only be effective memory triggers is they match the way that the information
was encoded initially.

Subsequent retrieval of information improves
if cues (visual, auditory, etc.) received at the time of recall are similar to those
present at the time of
encoding.
Example: scuba divers that learn information in the water are more likely to remember
the information in the water than if they learn it on land.

Also best explanation of mood-dependent memory.

Eidetic memory.

Ability to recall memories so clearly they can be viewed like a clear picture.

A specific remembered instance of a category.
Get the details (as well as what is typical).

Used in retrieval for an unfamiliar object, or if the situation includes
a reminder of a specific instance.
Compare with prototype, used in retrieval for a familiar object.

Experiment.

Between Subjects:
expose different, randomly assigned participants to different experimental conditions;
look for differences in performance between groups that receive the experimental conditions
compared with the control conditions.

Within Subjects:
expose a participant to more than one experimental
condition; look for differences in performance of the participant depending on the condition.

Explanatory Style.

How one describes one's success and failure to others.

Eye witness.

Eyewitnesses are heavily relied upon: in 347 British cases with only only eye witness, there was 74% conviction.
[But need comparative info on % of convictions in comparable cases with no eye witness.]

Memories of eyewitnesses deteriorate when time elapses before they are interviewed.

Memories are manipulable; e.g.

where students are asked to estimate the speed
'at which the car was going past the barn' in a movie, six times as many students
reported there was a barn as students that were not so primed.

where students are asked 'did the truck pass the red car while it was stopped at the STOP
sign, 80% believed that they saw the nonexistent STOP sign. But it was a YIELD sign.

Bruce et al. (1993): people are 96% accurate at sorting faces into male or female.
Bruce claimed this was bottom-up and that features were guiding perception.

So Bruce did a second experiment, making the features harder to detect, by presenting
the photos upside-down. Accuracy decreased to 79% (not face recognition, but gender estimate).

Tanaka and Farah (1993):
Is face recognition based on detection of specific features or the whole face?
Experiment showed participants are significantly more accurate in recognizing Drawings of full faces
compared to parts of faces; for drawings of houses, participants showed no difference in ability to recognize of full view
or partial view.

Explains how we can recognize partial views and variations (which
template matching fails to explain).

Problems:

No clear definition of a feature.

No clear definition of which features to combine or how to combine them.

Filter model.

Broadbent proposed this model as an explanation of how people can often shift and reset their
attention easily and very quickly:

Series of flexible filter that use simple physical properties (not meaning).

Prevent overload of central processor.

First filter screens out incoming stimuli that don't match.

Second filter looks for sound that match the target.

Filter model (modified) or Modified filter model.

Two stages:

Check for physical features.

Check for high priority items.

Flashbulb memories.

Vivid images of circumstances associated with surprising or strongly emotional events.
It is now a discredited idea that memories with particularly strong emotional impact
are more completely accurate than other memories.
If there was a complete memory, it should reliably report extraordinary detail, including (Browning and Kulik):

Location where one learns the news.

Source of the news.

What one was doing at the time of learning.

Emotional response of oneself. Literature shows little evidence that people can
recall their specific emotion.

Emotional response of others.

Aftermath: what did they start to do after learning the news.

fMRI.

functional MRI:
internal imaging method using
magnetism of the blood.
Blood leaving the heart is maximally magnetic and
decreases as moves further from heart.

Frontal lobe syndrome.

Problems with supervision; disturbed attention; increased distractibility;
fine with routines but cannot learn tasks in a new situation.
Portions of the frontal lobe are vital for controlled processing and the
Supervisory Attentional System (SAS).

The study of an organism's mind and behavior by examining the organism's interactions with
and adaptation to its environment.
The function of an object determines the form, structure, and material of an object.
Look at the mind from the point of view of what it does and what is served by that.
Emphasize the adaptation of the organism to its environment.
Focus on what role a particular system (like the mind) served for an organism (like a human).
The study of the contents of consciousness [William James].

A simple rule that produces a solution.
Efficient and time-saving mental shortcut that can replace a complex judgment by a simple rule of thumb;
often good enough; sometimes misleading.
Contrast with an
algorithm,
which produces a precise result.

Hippocampus.

Part of the limbic system involved in acquiring explicit memories.
Used in the fast consolidation of emotional and declarative memories.

Hypothesis.

A proposition consistent with know data and probably true, but requiring further experimentation.

Sensory memory for visual events; stores large amounts of
information for a very brief time, to about half a second.
Lets us see (for example) the figure traced by a sparkler in the night.
Sperling's
partial-report
research demonstrated that the capacity of iconic memory was larger than previously believed.

Insane.

Unhappy or discontent with one's own functioning to the extent that it interferes with ones
own life or with society (one has subjective discomfort and maladaptive functioning).

Intentional filter.

Our expectations influence the filter for further processing, for attention.
Experiments on early-selection processing: dichonic listening
of one attended channel and one unattended channel.
Auditor reports a phrase from unattended channel that completes a phrase from the attended channel.

Though as yet, there are no experiments to distinguish early and late selection models.

Interacting Image.

A method of remembering a pair of words by picturing an interaction where one image does something
to the other image, e.g. an elephant smoking a cigar.

Interference.

Difficulty in retrieving a memory, particularly if retrieval cues do not
point effectively to one specific memory but to several.
See for example
retroactive interference.

Interference task.

Any task that prevents maintenance rehearsal or prevents memories from being transferred to
LTM.
e.g. Count backward from 1000 by 3's or write your phone number backwards.
In face of such interference:

0 second retention ~95%

5 second retention ~50%

10 second retention ~27%

18 second retention ~11%

Internal attribution.

Attribution
that ascribes the cause of a person's action to factors internal to the person.
Factors include abilities, attitudes, effort, moods, and personality traits.

The process based on experience that leads to a relatively
permanent change in the mind, and therefore in actual or potential behavior.

Levels-of-processing theory .

A theory that the deeper the level
at which one processes information, the more likely one is to retain the memory.
The depth to which STM contents are processed during consolidation to
LTM. e.g. a superficial analysis would be the vowel count;
a deeper level would be the meaning and relevance.

Limbic system .

The regions of the brain that regulate memory as well as the major physiological functions,
emotional behavior, and basic motivational urges. Six components:

amygdala: controls emotions and aggression
as well as the formation of emotional memory.

fornix: connecting two hemispheres of cerebellum.

hippocampus: involved in acquiring explicit memories;
used in fast consolidation of emotional and declarative memories.

mammillary bodies.

olifactory bulb.

septum.

Connects to the forebrain's

diencephalon.

telencephalon.

Loci (memory method of).

A mnemonic device in which an idea is associated with a place or part of a building.

LTM.

Long-term memory. Memory processes that preserve information for later retrieval at any time.
Relatively permanent; unlimited capacity and duration.
Compare with short-term memory.

Bahrick studied the retention of Spanish vocabulary, and showed that:

Large portions of information remained in LTM.

Over fifty years.

Memories can be altered later by storage of related information, interfering with LTM:

LTM can include additions to the original event.

LTM can lose items from the original event.

LTM can include revisions of the original event.

On encoding information for storing in LTM, the meaning is more important than the
exact physical form.

Words confused in long term memory are often related semantically
(such as 'big' and 'large').

Several interrelated processes of
cognition
used for storage, manipulation, and retrieval of information.

The capacity to encode and store something,
and to recall something learned or to recognize something previously experienced.
The most active area in
psychology research.
Used by theories of attention, etc.

Participants that thought they were in an experiment of learning
to measure the effect of electrical shock on stimulating memorization.
In turn, each participant was designed a 'teacher' and was
directed to administer increasing levels of electrical shock to a 'learner'
each time the 'learner' gave a wrong answer.

A confederate learner who was unseen but heard by participants, and made cries of
pain on the simulated receipt of each electrical shock.

An 'authority' confederate that directed each 'teacher' to administer increasing levels of
electrical shock.

Proposed by Selfridge (1959):
letter perception is based on bottom-up feature detection by 'demon' detectors
who 'shout' louder the more confident they are,
to attract the attention of the demon at the next level of integration.

Paranoia.

A disorder characterized by systematic delusions of persecution
and/or grandeur.
Arises when one has excess of dopamine in the
limbic system and insufficient in the cortex;
in a milder form can lead to
shyness.

Partial-report research.

Demonstrates that the capacity of
iconic memory
is larger than previously believed.

Pattern recognition.

Classification of a stimulus into a known category.
Storing general patterns of events

Peg-word memorization method.

A memory system in which easy-to-visualize words (in a specific order)
are associated with difficult-to-remember words or numbers.

Peptide.

Molecule formed from liking amino acids;
a small protein of fewer than 50 amino acids.

Peptide bond.

Amide bond.
Shorter than C-N because of C=O.

Perception.

Interpretation of a stimulus; recognition of an external object that produced a
sensation.
Contrast with sensation.

PNS serves limbs and organs, including the somatic nervous system and the
autonomic nervous system.

The spinal and cranial nerves that connect one's sensory receptors to one's
CNS
and one's
CNS
to one's muscles and glands.

Perseveration

Repetition (to an unusual degree) of an activity or a mental state.
Spontaneous reoccurrence in the mind of the same idea, tune, phrase, etc.

PET.

Positron Emission Tomography, a kind of magnetic resonance imaging.
Internal imaging method using
gamma rays emitted from inject radio-isotopes (reaches brain in 30 seconds)
to obtain of images of activity in the living brain.
Measures blood flow or metabolic activity, localized in specific brain areas
as assigned tasks are performed.
Expensive equipment. Time averaging, so resolution can be poor.

Phenotype.

Observable characteristics of an organism
(arise from interaction of an organism's genotype
and environment).

An unjustified negative attitude toward people because they are members of a specific social group.
This is a learned attitude toward a target, which is sometimes a person and sometimes a thing.
The attitude includes dislike or fear together with stereotypes (negative beliefs) to 'justify' the attitude.
The result is behavior (acted or intended) that avoids or controls or destroys the target person or thing.

The first information received tends to carry more weight than later
information on an overall impression.
Contrast with recency effect.
Primacy and recency effects can be manipulated independently,
which indicates at least two types of memory are at work.

The conversion to its opposite of a wish or impulse perceived as dangerous.

Recall.

Determination of something you have in memory.

Recency effect.

The last information received tends to carry greater weight than earlier information.
Contrast with primacy effect.
Primacy and recency effects can be manipulated independently,
which indicates that at least two types of memory are at work.

Naturalistic observations: watch people in everyday contexts
going about their familiar, cognitive business.
This has the advantage of ecological validity,
that what is studied occurs in the real world not just artificially in a laboratory.
Lacks experimental control.

A type of
amnesia
in which the ability to remember previously formed memories is lost.
Occurs after a brain disruption if the material from before the disruption is difficult to remember.
Compare
anterograde amnesia.

An organized system of beliefs about some stimulus object.
A schema is based on experience and guides how one processes new information.

Schizophrenia.

Genetic connection, but 90% of the people with schizophrenia do NOT have a parent with the same disorder.
Associated with large lateral ventricles, small enterior temporal lobes,
and lower activity in the frontal lobes.
Can arise from brain damage.

Has been treated with Chlorpromazine (D1, D2),
Haliperidol (D2), or
Clozapine (D4).

Predicts a person often copes with a specific threat to self-esteem
by affirming (reminding oneself of) unrelated and cherished aspects of one's
self-concept.

Self awareness.

The top level of consciousness.
One is
aware of oneself as an object of one's own attention and autobiography.

If someone is made self-aware
the correlation of actions an beliefs increases.
E.g. a mirror over an unattended bowl of Halloween candy reduced the kids that took more than the
one piece from 34% to 12%.

Self-concept.

One's thoughts and feelings by which one defines and identifies oneself.
One's mental model of one's attributes and abilities.

A theory that one experiences strong negative emotions when one perceives
discrepancy between one's desired
self-concept and
one's sense of one's actual self.
Self esteem is higher when these are consonant.

One of various attributional biases where one takes credit for one's success
(assigns "an internal locus of causality" for each positive outcome)
and denies responsibility for one's failure.
(assigns "an external locus of causality" for each negative outcome).

Semantic encoding.

Craik and Lockhart and other Levels of Processing theorists believe that semantic encoding
involves deeper processing than semantic encoding.

Research on false positive memory errors show that people tend to do semantic encoding of information automatically;
they tend to augment the actual information.

Experiments that measure clustering and the non-verbal response of reaction time
support the hypothesis that we do semantic coding.

Involves the deepest processing of stimulus information
(deeper than visual, acoustic, and tactile).

Semantic memory.

Generic, categorical knowledge of the world; knowledge of facts and how they relate to each other;
includes the meaning of words and concepts,
the nature and use of tools, how society functions, math skills, the names of the months, etc.

Consciousness that results from stimulation of a sense organ
(hearing, sight, smell, taste, touch)
or from the recognition of an emotion (such as the sensation of delight).
Contrast with perception.

Sensory memory.

Initial memory processes that preserving the fugitive impressions of sensory stimuli.
Initial storage of information within the senses; held fleetingly;
occurs while incoming messages are being transmitted to the brain.
Very large capacity; duration 15 seconds to 4 minutes.

A person's recall of the earliest and the latest
items in a list appears better than her recall of the middle items.
Example: kids often learn to recite 'A-B-C' and 'X-Y-Z' earlier than the rest of the letters.

First words are remembered better because they are processed into LTM
without as much interference as later words received.

Last words are remembered better because they are in STM (saved there by maintenance rehearsal).

SES: Socio-Economic Status.

In the USA this tends to be a euphemism for 'class'.

Sexual harassment .

Unwelcome physical or verbal sexual approaches that the recipient finds intimidating, hostile, or offensive
or that create such a social environment.

Shaping.

A behavioral method that reinforces responses that successive
approximations, tending to ultimately match the desired response.

Short-term memory (STM).

Memory processes that use information, but store it for only a few seconds.
The working memory containing things the person is thinking about,
selecting and processing ongoing information.
Capacity about 7 items.
Compare with long-term memory (LTM).

Studies with the Brown-Peterson procedure show that information that was in
short-term memory is lost after 18-20 seconds (without rehearsal).

Often a search of short-term memory appears to be serial and exhaustive.

Information in short-term memory usually gets lost by decay and interference:
some decay is essential to avoid catastrophic proactive interference.

Prior knowledge lets you hold more information in short-term memory by
chunking.

Shyness.

Inhibited social interaction due to discomfort or inhibition in interpersonal situations;
interferes with one's pursuit of interpersonal or professional goals.
Arises from too much dopamine in the
limbic system and not enough in the cortex,
which can also lead to
paranoia.

The pattern of responses (specific and nonspecific) one makes
to stimulus events that disturb one's equilibrium or tax or exceed its ability to cope.
Too much stress in children can create permanently low levels of serotonin
and high levels of norephinephrine create a potential of violent behavior.

Structuralism.

The tendency to emphasize structure.
Cognitive structures are basic units of thought, and include: concept, prototype, exemplar.
Thoughts are produced by combining sensations
and perceptions.
Structuralism views all human mental experience as a combination of simple elements, and posits that the underlying
structure of the human mind are revealed by analysis of the basic elements of sensation. After Wilhem Wundt.

Subconscious awareness.

The mental processing of information not currently in consciousness
working memory and
not available from
long term memory by customary recall.
An example is when one's mind works in 'background'
on a puzzle of a personal or professional nature,
and presents the solution as a sudden insight or 'ah-ha' moment.

Supervisory Attentional System (SAS).

Norman and Shallice's Model is intuitively appealing:

SAS plans, organizes, and controls actions.

SAS model:

Procedures can be automatic.

Automatic procedure can be prioritized.

Procedures can get controlled processing, which is SAS.

Tested by Wisconsin Card Sorting: participants sort cards by color or number or shape; rules are
switched; perseverative errors are common.

SAS explains:

Action slips (failures to complete an intended action).

Stereotypes (can be activated automatically, particularly by people under time pressure).

How do we explain how we recognize incomplete patterns such as partially hidden objects?

Thinking.

Thought.

Top-down processing.

One's expectations guide the selection and combination of information.
We use prior knowledge to organize data from the senses.
Expectations (due to prior experiences) trigger interpretation of ambiguous stimuli.

Trait.

A relatively stable attribute of an individual; differs between individuals.

Transference.

Occurs in psychoanalysis if one attaches to a
therapist some feeling(s) that one held toward a significant person of a past emotional conflict.

Unipolar.

Mania episodes.
Twice as common in women as in men; more common for married women;
less common for married men.

On average seven episodes per lifetime for a unipolar person.
Compare with bipolar.

A memory method in which verbal associations are created for items to be learned.
e.g. 'homes' for the Great Lakes.
e.g. create a story that links the words to remember can let one remember
six times as much.

Word superiority effect.

The context of words influences the recognition of letters.

Identify a letter more quickly and accurately if it appears within a word.

Connectionist theories explain this effect:

Network exist that connect related units of information.

One sees fragments of features in a word.

Detecting these features activates some letter units

The letter units activate a word unit (a combination of letters).

The activated word unit activates all the letters in that word.

Connectionist explanation is debated and unproved.
Alternate explanations are that the memory has been primed or is currently active.

Experiment: participants were given identical text with ambiguous information on Rasputin,
except that his date of birth was manipulated; half of the participants were shown the text
with their (month-day) birth-date and they 'like' Rasputin; half were controls, given text
where Rasputin's birthday was not altered to match theirs, and their response was 'mixed'.
Having something in common increases liking.

In 1971, Dr. Philip Zimbardo assigned 18 Stanford students to 'guard' or 'prisoner' roles.
Their behavior reflected their assigned role
and the experiment was discontinued for the safety (physical as well as mental)
of the students in the 'prisoner' roles.
In 1971, a psychologist divided 18 student volunteers into 'guards' and
'prisoners'. Within six days the guards' behavior had become so brutal
(particularly at night when they thought they were unobserved) that
the experiment had to be stopped. Zimbardo was cited by The Guardian
(Emma Brockes on Tuesday October 16, 2001, at
http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/medicalscience/story/0,9837,575022,00.html)
as saying:

It wasn't until much later that I realized how far into my prison role I was,
that I was thinking like a prison superintendent rather than a
research psychologist. [For example] less than 36 hours into the experiment,
Prisoner no 8612 began suffering from acute emotional disturbance,
disorganized thinking, uncontrollable crying, and rage. In spite of all of
this, we had already come to think so much like prison authorities that we
thought he was trying to con us — to fool us into releasing him.